Oct21Written by:Rich Langford
10/21/2008 11:01 AM 
I am looking forward to sharing some thoughts about education technology in this space and especially in response to questions from Microsoft partners regarding the education market. This subject of becoming a "trusted advisor" comes up fairly often in my conversations and I hope it will be a good kickoff for this blog.
I was recently asked by one of our partners, “If you were a small company like ours, how would you market our product if you only had $100?” I didn’t have to hesitate in answering the question. I said I would pay the carfare for the CIO from my best account to visit the colleague in another school district with whom they were closest so that they could have a nice lunch and talk about how great I am to work with.
Peer-to-peer referrals are the most successful method of marketing in the education business. The reason for this is simple; education CIOs have learned to be extremely paranoid about technology vendors. The truth is that almost everyone who comes to visit has a wonderful story to tell and some kind of “magic quadrant,” “wave,” or other report that will tell you that they are the best in their particular area of expertise. Every day they deal with someone from a technology company who has no objective other than to retire quota. The circle of trust gets even tighter when they consider the list of predecessors who left unceremoniously and realize that the entire weight of success or failure will rest on them for any project they undertake. Education CIOs will rarely trust the advice of anyone who they see as not being similarly accountable for successful education technology initiatives and services.
The raises the question of whether we can ever truly become “trusted advisors” to these customers. My experience is that it is definitely possible. In fact, if you have ever heard a customer ask to know if you had “skin in the game,” you have actually been asked to demonstrate that you share an accountability level for the project’s success beyond quota retirement or sales incentive that entitles you to some level of trust. The key is to learn about the business and demonstrate a care and commitment for the customer’s business. I think too many of us fail to recognize that the CIO and the IT Director that we are used to dealing with also have customers, namely the department heads and faculty of the institution they serve. If we learn to partner with them to sell solutions to their customers, we will eventually become the trusted advisor we seek to be. This, of course, requires that we move out of our comfort zone of technology and learn the education business.